Welcome back to my Game of the Year countdown. Today, we look at the best FPS of the entire year. If you’ve missed any of the other articles, check them out here: #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9 and #10.

2. Doom

This is the most surprising game of the year for me. I have never played any Doom game before this one but had watched Brad play through Doom 2. I heard so many good things about this game that I bought it. However, this one lost out on being number one because I dropped this game for at least 2 months this year. I went back to it and finished it and loved playing it but I can’t have it at number one because of that one thing.

This game, though, is an amazing shooter that makes you want to explore the levels because of how dense they are with things to do. The amount of care they put into this game is evident in every level. After each combat scenario, I would spend at least 10 minutes looking around the arena in order to see if there were any secrets around that I had missed. The map was so well done to show you where the secret was at but making you puzzle out how to get up or down there. I didn’t do as much of that when I started playing it but as I went further and further, I spent more and more time poking around and searching for things.

Each combat encounter is so well done and the in the moment actions you have to take are so smooth and tight you just fall into the game. The shooting and weapons are so well done and sound so great that you just want to shoot the weapons while you aren’t fighting just to hear them. As you move your way around each arena, you have to figure out what weapon to use and when to switch so you don’t run out of ammo at the worst time. Normally, I just stick with one weapon in an FPS and never switch things out. With Doom, you are forced to change on the fly depending on what demon you are facing.

The biggest thing to me is that the game never seemed to be unfair to you. Sometimes, games just feel unfair to you but Doom never did. Whenever I died, it was because I was using the wrong weapon or hadn’t switched to a different one when I needed to. This game feels so fluid, fun and intense that everything works out. A small part of the game that I grew to really love was the story. They don’t hold your hand and you have to puzzle parts of it out but once you figure out what exactly is happening, you pump your fist and go “Hell yeah”. It is so subtle and you figure out how it fits together as the game goes along. The first time you get to Hell and listen to the audio logs they have there are amazing and so well done.

The last thing I’ll talk about is the music. When the music kicks in, you know that shit is about to go down. The music fits perfectly with the game and helps to bring it up to the next level. The music is always there and you are always cognizant of when it’s on so you just let it surround you and bring you deeper into the experience.

Come back later today for my favorite game of 2016.

The title is wrong, should say #1.

A few minor things that come to mind:

• Predictive vs. predictable enemies
  In Doom and Quake, the enemies behave like zombies and all attacks (including hitscan) can be dodged. In Doom 2016, I got the impression that the projectiles were being shot towards and lobbed around me, but enemies also seem to predict where you're likely to be, making it very difficult to dodge projectiles from nearby enemies. Combat sometimes feels like a deathmatch except with lengthy respawns.
• Explosive barrels have no radial indicator
  In Half-Life, explosive barrels are clearly marked, they burn before they explode, and the player is expecting the environment to be dangerous. Given that Doom 2016 is very gamey, I would've liked some kind of shockwave to indicate how wide the explosion radius was, like in Unreal.
• Fall damage
  Possibly a glitch, but I died on one occasion from fall damage after jumping down into a combat arena in hell. Most of the time you get the "impact compensation" message or the little animation or whatever, but there's never any indication that fall damage will ever hurt you besides falling off of the level.
• Missing collision on parts of the geometry
  Another one-off, but I also died after clipping through the floor while peering over ledges looking for secrets in hell.